Water cooler

Richmond Police are reporting a homicide that occurred last Monday at a toll booth on Powhite Parkway. Officers were called to the 6300 block of Powhite, near Chippenham Parkway, and found Luis G. Gomez-Flores, 35, unconscious after a fight had broken out inside of a car. Gomez-Flores would succumb to his injuries at the hospital.

Speaking of, City Council will also meet today at 6:00 PM for their regularly scheduled meeting. You can read the agenda (PDF) in its current state. At the moment there's lots of money getting allocated for transportation projects, including new signal timing on Broad Street; a few ordinances related to Gillies Creek; and re-appropriating $2.4 million of excess money towards City employee bonuses.

Y'all, why does the RTD Editorial Board feel the need to go out of its way to defend neo Confederates? This is a completely unnecessary piece referencing an event that took place months ago. It blames a Black woman for not happily reconciling with a group of White people erecting a Confederate monument while denying slavery's role in the Civil War. It's 2017, read the freaking room. Why does this even exist in our local paper? DO BETTER.

This morning's longread

I've seen lots of strong reactions to this short story in the New Yorker. I think it's neat that folks are reading and talking about a piece of short fiction.

Although now, she realized, maybe that had hurt Robert’s feelings, too. She’d thought it was clear that she just didn’t want to go on a date where she worked, but maybe he’d taken it more personally than that; maybe he’d suspected that she was ashamed to be seen with him. She was starting to think that she understood him—how sensitive he was, how easily he could be wounded—and that made her feel closer to him, and also powerful, because once she knew how to hurt him she also knew how he could be soothed. She asked him lots of questions about the movies he liked, and she spoke self-deprecatingly about the movies at the artsy theatre that she found boring or incomprehensible; she told him about how much her older co-workers intimidated her, and how she sometimes worried that she wasn’t smart enough to form her own opinions on anything. The effect of this on him was palpable and immediate, and she felt as if she were petting a large, skittish animal, like a horse or a bear, skillfully coaxing it to eat from her hand.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.